Compete by Creating a Well-Run Company

Building a work team that runs like a well-oiled machine is one of the most surefire ways to protect your company from competition today and in the future. Efficiency and productivity emerge in organizations that focus on making sure that teamwork is possible and that information sharing is routine across an organization. The tight-knit work teams in these companies share information freely and broadly across the organization and, therefore, tend to have happier customers, better employee retention and higher productivity.

Use the following tips to oil the gears of your machine and compete more effectively.

Evaluate information flow
Informed teams are competitive teams. With this in mind, create a system to ease the sharing and flow of information across your teams. Do you have an information “blockage” with one employee? Do you lack technology to make it easy for your team members to coordinate efforts? Weaknesses like these can prevent even the most satisfied and well-intentioned teams from collaborating in a way that is essential to retain and increase competitiveness.

Research and implement best practices
Give your team the opportunity to do their best work by educating them about how things are done best. Each industry and discipline has best practices. Management best practices are also readily available. Regularly gather and share information on best practices in order to give your team the information they need to build their skills.

Two implementation details can help with the success of this information sharing. One, determine if your team needs support in building the skills needed to attain the level of expertise required to do these best practices. Two, ensure that best practices are presented to your team as something to strive for as a means of improving their work experience. This is a better approach than holding up best practices as an example of team shortcomings.

Provide a flexible working environment
Well-run companies tend to have programs in place that provide training, career advancement and flexibility. Whether these programs are formal or not, employee satisfaction, improved morale and the associated productivity increases can be tied to how a workplace accommodates an employee’s needs and preferences. Staff members who have the opportunity for advancement or skill building are more likely to feel satisfied with their jobs and more likely to do their best work. Likewise, those who are allowed some flexibility — whether it is time off for personal responsibilities or occasional telecommuting to manage a long commute — are also likely to be happier.

A line can be drawn for many teams between satisfaction and the ability to focus, work hard and share information required for the company to do great work.

Create an environment that encourages mutual respect
Another way to describe this is to “limit the number of annoying people on your team.” One or two people who horde information, speak negatively or ignore deadlines or otherwise challenge team work can derail your productivity and diminish your competitiveness.

It’s quite easy to justify keeping these staffers in place if they contribute intellectually, creatively or otherwise. Their contribution equation though, needs to include the cost they extract from the team. One way to arrive at this cost is to determine how many incidents (missed deadlines, comments, etc.) occur over a given period of time. Arrive at a time or financial cost for each incident and do the math. Also keep in mind that each time this person “strikes,” other team members are affected and lose productivity because of frustration.

Focus on retention
Team strength builds over time and the stronger your team, the more competitive your company. Learn what is required to keep your teams intact and employed with you and then create a retention system. You can conduct research within your company to learn what changes can positively affect retention. Speaking with key team influencers in your organization to get an on-the-ground perspective may also help.

Tool you need to become Best Run Business: -

Affordable Business Management Solution

Be Bold and Learn To Think Big

Big Think Strategy: How to Leverage Bold Ideas and Leave Small Thinking Behind
By Bernd H. Schmitt, Harvard Business School Press, Boston.

The goal of Big Think strategy is to leverage bold ideas and leave small thinking behind. Moreover, we must create the organizational structures and processes to support individual projects and keep the organization focused on Big Think.

The Big Think strategy process consists of six interrelated tasks. The first three tasks concern strategy formulation:
· Sourcing new ideas
· Evaluating the ideas
· Turning the ideas into a Big Think strategy

The following three tasks concern strategy implementation:
· Executing Big Think
· Leading Big Think
· Sustaining Big Think in the organization

While these strategy and implementation tasks may seem familiar, Big Think offers a unique approach, incorporating new methodologies and tools, for each of the six tasks. To remain focused on Big Think, we must employ this approach and not fall back into a Small Think mentality.

Sourcing New Ideas
Small Think strategic planning tries to source new ideas solely by analyzing a host of market and competitive factors. But for Big Think, sourcing really new ideas requires that we go far beyond this simple analytical toolbox. The creative tools used as part of Big Think idea sourcing are all about seeking new connections. We must find new associations by connecting seemingly unrelated concepts. We must benchmark outside our industry (not only within), question long-held assumptions (the sacred cows) of a business, and step out of the timeframe of the present. We must strip down our business strategy to its very core to get more radical ideas. Most important, we cannot source ideas only from within the organization; we must include customers in the idea-sourcing process.

Evaluating the ideas
Effective idea sourcing should generate multiple ideas, which then must be evaluated before we choose which to pursue. Small Think asks a number of decision makers within the organization to evaluate new ideas according to their familiarity and similarity to past initiatives but never asks whether the idea will radically impact the business. To remain focused on Big Think, we should cluster and evaluate new ideas first in terms of their potential for lasting impact and whether they will change markets. Only then should we ask whether new ideas are doable. Ideally, the evaluation process should be as broad as possible, not only including expert decision makers.

Turning the ideas into a Big Think strategy
Too often, a strategic brief gets bogged down in corporate mission-speak, irrelevant data, and linear strategy maps, until the core idea is diluted by Small Think. Instead, Big Think demands that you capture your bold ideas in a crisp image that you further develop using our Big Think strategy quadrants: organizational capabilities required, opportunities and challenges in the business networks, the customer value created by the strategy, and the role of the market ecosystem in bringing it to life. The strategy development process of Big Think resembles the score of a Mahler symphony: you are weaving your bold ideas into a dynamic whole that provides a clear plan for achieving your goals.

Executing Big Think
With Small Think, even the best new strategy can get bogged down in the execution: inertia slows the launch, the rollout is divided between silos (manufacturing, marketing, service) that never communicate, and the customer is nowhere to be found. Executing a Big Think strategy demands tremendous effort; it can feel as if you have to pull a ship over a mountain. Rather than getting buy-in from your employees, you must tap into their dreams. Rather than wasting time on aligning the entire organization perfectly around the strategy, you must organize flexibly. Finally, you must attract your customers’ attention through bold communications.

Leading Big Think
Big Think requires leadership. It cannot succeed with Small Think’s aversion to risk and focus on short-term results. Leaders at various levels of the organization must have the guts to take on the Big Think project, the passion to stand behind it, and the perseverance to see it through to ultimate success. Otherwise, you may just as well let robots do the work. Big Think leaders have a broad view of how to instill fundamental change. They do not just have a plan; they have an agenda. To stay motivated on the way, they consult a diverse group of experts and move in different circles in their professional and social lives.

Sustaining Big Think in the organization
The ultimate challenge of Big Think is not just to set up one successful Big Think project but to implant Big Think into the organizational tissue. For that to happen, we must break down Small Think’s organizational silos to assume an interdisciplinary mind-set. Moreover, employees must view work as play, and play as work, and be entrepreneurial. We need employees who are what I call “Big Thinky Heads.” These are people who radiate a childlike excitement about new ideas. To keep them excited, we constantly expose them to new information that is relevant to their projects and stimulates their thoughts.

Bernd H. Schmitt is Robert D. Calkin Professor of International Business at Columbia Business School. He advises business executives on strategy, creativity and innovation, and he is a frequent keynote speaker at conferences worldwide.

Link to get the book: -
Excerpted from Big Think Strategy: How to Leverage Bold Ideas and Leave Small Thinking BehindBernd H. Schmitt; Harvard Business School Press, Boston.

Imporve Efficiency For a Stronger Bottom Line

For many small and midsize enterprises (SMEs) like yours, achieving profitable and sustainable growth is both an aspiration and a challenge. With “economies of speed” as a distinct advantage, you can adopt a wide range of strategies for maintaining business momentum and outperforming much larger competition. Modern technologies such as integrated business software have become increasingly crucial to helping SMEs gain higher operational efficiency and transparency while setting a solid foundation for future growth. By leveraging solutions based on modern technologies that best fit your needs, you can achieve profitable growth in a highly dynamic market.

Market Dynamics and Challenges
To more effectively address the challenges in today’s highly dynamic market, small and midsize companies must increasingly focus their limited resources on the areas of highest impact:
Managing costs and protecting margins are essential to a company’s ability to survive and thrive in various economic cycles.

• Acquiring and retaining the best customers requires even faster response and deeper understanding of their needs and trends.
• Controlling cash flow and working capital requires companies to more precisely monitor every dollar.
• Maximizing results with scarce resources means companies must optimize use of their limited working capital, employees, and assets.

Market Dynamics and Challenges
As sophisticated business management software solutions become more readily available to small and midsize enterprises, they are emerging as essential management tools to help organizations cut costs, improve business performance, and enable revenue growth, especially in times of uncertainties. Integrated business software can:

Connect your company’s assets, employees, and customers to maximize operational efficiency while reducing errors and costs

• Provide a complete view of your customers so you can tailor services to meet their demands and exceed their expectations, thereby maximizing revenue
• Capture crucial data and deliver full transparency across the enterprise that allows you to be more effective in managing priorities and optimizing resources
• Provide real-time information so you can better control operations, make better decisions, and anticipate and respond faster to changes, thereby reducing risks.

I look forward to hear your comments.

Solutions for Small Businesses and Midsize Companies, Made to fit your needs. Designed to help you grow.

Small & Midsize Companies Business Software Links: -

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How to Make Your Small Business Look Big

Free web-based email makes you think of dead-giveaway addresses like ninja-girl9378@hotmail.com, which are unsuitable for putting on a business card or resume. But setting up your own email server or paying a hosting provider to do it for your small organization can be costly or time-consuming. The good news is you can get all the benefits of the leading web-based email service out there -- Google's Gmail -- with a yourname@yourdomain.com address for free.
With a Google Apps account, you can look like you've got a full IT team behind your small organization but get the simple setup and access that web-based applications offer. Google Apps (formerly named "Google Apps for Your Domain") includes Gmail, calendar and document sharing, simple web site hosting, and instant messaging to all the people involved at your dot-com for free.
Here's how it works. Say you own a web site domain name like thejonesfamily.com. (That you've got to pay for; prices range from $10 to $60 a year.) You can create accounts like jill@thejonesfamily.com, jack@thejonesfamily.com, and sarah@thejonesfamily.com. Each person gets his or her own email account, calendar (for sharing amongst the group), instant messenger account on Google Talk, and Google Docs account for sharing and collaborating on office documents like spreadsheets, Word documents, and slide shows.
The most obvious advantages to using Google Apps is the low cost, zero maintenance, and data storage "in the cloud," which means your email, documents, and events are always available anywhere you can get online with a web browser. You don't need an IT system administrator to create accounts and give users access to services; you can do that all yourself using Google Apps' dashboard. You don't have to worry about data backup (it's all stored on Google's servers), hitting email account storage limits (Gmail's up to 7GB of storage per user now), or futzing with VPNs, firewalls, or specific software. At any time you can choose to switch to another provider and take your domain name with you, which means you don't have to change your email address if you decide Google Apps isn't working for you.
The main disadvantage to using Google Apps' free plan over paying a hosting provider is that if the server goes down or you have problems with your account, you don't have a direct line to tech support. (A $50/year Google Apps account does include phone support for "critical issues." I don't have experience with this, but in general Google is notoriously bad at offering tech support on an individual basis. When you have troubles, you've got to scour mailing lists and blogs to find out what the story is.) Also, some organizations might not feel comfortable storing private information or documents on Google's servers.
But for a family, softball team, side business, small business, or individual who just wants professional-looking email addresses and an easy way to share documents and calendars, Google Apps is a great solution. While I do back up my email to my computer from my Google Apps account periodically just in case the day comes when Gmail's down and no one's home, that day has not come yet.

Some useful Links for Google Apps
Authorized Google Apps Reseller

The Power of a Good Business Plan

Not every business can get away with something as simple as the initial business plan for Compaq Computer. It was a sketch of a portable personal computer, scratched on the back of a placemat from House of Pies Restaurant and Bakery in Houston.

This valuable placemat is ensconced in a glass case in Compaq’s headquarters. That placemat was enough to persuade venture capitalist Ben Rosen to invest in the budding business proposed by three engineers, a business that turned into the fastest-growing startup ever founded up to that time.

But that is very much the exception. Don’t count on your back-of-the-envelope jottings to provide sufficient justification to persuade your unfriendly local loan officer to approve that six-figure line of credit for your business. No, you must develop a workable business model for your startup or a plausible plan for the major expansion of your existing business.

Like all business plans, yours needs to answer the key questions about the purpose of your business: What will it do, and how will it earn money doing it, on a sustainable basis? Small businesses in general are more susceptible to business failure caused by inadequate business planning. There is less leeway for financial missteps. A million dollar boondoggle that causes a quarterly profit dip in a large enterprise can cripple a small business

You may not have a choice about whether to develop a business plan. Most businesses are required by their source of financing to create one. Before a bank will advance a loan, it wants to know how the money will be used and how it will be repaid. Before your board of directors or your division chief approves your annual budget, especially with that big new investment you'd like to see them make, they want a convincing rationale explaining how the risk of this investment will generate rewarding profits and when. Financials are an important part of every business plan. But it’s not the only component, nor even the most important. Before you can intelligently talk about finances, you must create a business model, which is the economic rationale for the existence of the business.

Writing your business plan helps refine your thinking, and that may be its greatest value to you. When you first set down your plan, it may look great. But in the cold light of the following day, you may realize it has some holes or requires additional explanation.

Do you need a business plan even if you don’t require financing? A loan officer is like a friend who will lend you an umbrella, as long as it’s not raining. When you have a desperate need for financing, a bank has you over the proverbial barrel. Don’t count on getting a good deal for financing when you desperately need the money.

So the best time to prepare the financial component of a business plan is when you don’t need money.
Say what?
If your plan shows that your financial requirements are modest and could in all probability be self-financed, that just whets a banker’s financial appetite. You’ll look like a good client to sign up for a line of financing because it appears as though your business will have no problems paying back any money borrowed. Bankers like low risk. A well-thought-out business plan lets you show how you will manage risk, which is the thing bankers like second best

Check out Business Plan Pro Software for making your own business plans.

11 Killer Instincts of Entrepreneurship

Here's a quick look at the 11 Killer Instincts of Entrepreneurship:

1. The Solution Instinct: This is about ideas and always seeing them. It's about seeing new opportunities while traveling, shopping, or working. Seeing problems and potential solutions to those problems is at the heart of valuable ideas and business models.

2. The Detective Instinct: This is about fact-finding and due-diligence. It's about letting go of the emotion and excitement of a good idea and taking a venture-capitalist approach. This instinct is something that keeps one constantly assessing how a business model will work, scale, and succeed... without personal bias.

3. The Great Communicator Instinct: This is about connecting and constantly selling. It's a constant awareness that every point of communication matters. Whether communicating with partners, investors, vendors, employees, or competitors; every communication is an opportunity to strengthen your company.

4. The Youthful Genius Instinct: This is about doing what you love. When we were young, we dreamed big dreams and showed glimmers of what we might become. Tapping into the expectation of our youth is central to successful entrepreneurship.

5. The Entrepreneurial Heritage Instinct: This is about how our heritage can reveal some or our natural gifts. What has your family and ancestors been successful at already? Exploring your roots can help one tap into opportunity. There is a reason why many families pass along entrepreneurial success and create "dynasties" of their own.

6. The Risk-Taker Instinct: This is about going out on a ledge. No risk, no reward. It's a fundamental factor of business building or almost any major endeavor. Finding the calculated balance of risk and opportunity is key.

7. The Work-Horse Instinct: This is about paying the price. Doing whatever it takes. Those "overnight successes" usually require at least 5 years of hard work and incredible sacrifice to get there.

8. The Thick-Skinned Instinct: This is about being tough. Resilience, optimism and a positive mindset reside in every great entrepreneur. The fundamental key to success in attaining goals? Never give up.

9. The Flexibility Instinct: This is about being willing to change. Emotion and pride must be removed from the process while building a business and paying attention to the best route to take. The right path naturally eventuates; if you're willing to recognize it and take it.

10. The Human Instinct: This is about people. Attracting the best people is more important than the business model itself. Treating people well, leading well, and serving with care is a fundamental reason why anything worthwhile should be built in the first place.

11. The Knowledge-Quest Instinct: This is about constantly learning. Reading, thinking, listening, observing, absorbing, and applying is a hallmark trait of a great entrepreneur.

These are unique instincts and in my experience, everyone possesses at least a touch of each of them. And it's my observation that every natural instinct can be discovered, uncovered, and developed by anyone interested in doing so.

Do You Have the Right Stuff to Be an Entrepreneur?

What does it take to start a successful business? While there's no such thing as the perfect entrepreneur, even Bill Gates has made mistakes, a number of personal qualities can help you to build a successful business. If you pass muster on most of these traits, you're off and running.

• You can delegate: No matter how smart and energetic you are, it's a mistake to try to attend to every detail yourself. Unless you're a solo act, you're going to have to trust employees to do their jobs so that you can run the business.
• You know how to teach others: In order to delegate successfully, you will need people with appropriate skills, and they may have to learn some of those skills from you.
• You are self-motivated: As a business owner, you won't have a boss to tell you when to get to work. If that's a problem, keep your day job.
• You can work with numbers: You will spend a fair amount of time keeping track of money, expenses, revenue, taxes, and the like. A math phobia won't help.
• You don't mind making mistakes: You will make mistakes; the trick is to learn from them and move on. Not everyone finds that easy to do.
• You like to work: Contrary to myth, you don't need to be a workaholic to start a successful business. Many entrepreneurs find that it makes more sense to establish a reasonable working pace, one that lets them strike a balance between work and their personal lives. That said, don't start a business unless you enjoy work. There's going to be plenty of it.
• You don't mind selling: You'll have to sell products to customers, of course. You may also need to sell lenders or other financial backers on the prospects of your company. And you'll need to convince potential employees to accept jobs with your firm rather than going to work for the competition.
• You don't quit easily: You'll encounter obstacles that might stymie some individuals. You'll have more success if you are the type of person who relishes such challenges. A dash of optimism is essential; it will help you handle the uncertainty that is part of every venture.